[00] — index Currently accepting new clients

Help your business work for AI agents.

A practical guide to the agent web.

Agents are becoming the new front door. Most websites aren't ready for them, and that's a fixable problem — usually a smaller one than people think. I'm Tyler. I authored the open standard for agent-operable businesses (OARS, at Knov.ai) and I help teams figure out what to actually do. Start with a free scan, read the standard, or just talk it through.

Run the free OARS scan Learn the standard

Some incredible clients

tyler willis — author of the open agent readiness standard

Author of OARS, the open agent-readiness standard

Accepting new clients and consulting work

[01] — premise Why this exists

Most "AI readiness" advice falls into two camps: panic ("you're already behind!") or vague reassurance ("just keep doing what you're doing"). Neither helps. The truth is that becoming agent-ready is a sequence of concrete, well-defined steps — and most of them are simpler than they sound. The work below is what I do to make that sequence visible, learnable, and doable for any business.

[02] — the standard OARS · v1.1

OARS, in six levels.

The open agent-readiness standard I wrote at Knov.ai breaks "ready for AI" into a real ladder. Each level requires full compliance with the one beneath it. Most businesses sit between Levels 1 and 2 today, often without knowing it.

Level 0

Reachable

The site is operationally usable by an agent at all — HTTPS, real uptime, Core Web Vitals that don't time out, baseline security headers, and no CAPTCHAs blocking verified agents. The floor everything else stands on.

Level 1

Discoverable

An agent can find and identify your business — what you do, where you operate, what you sell, which agents you welcome. Mostly small, one-time work: robots.txt, sitemap, Schema.org, llms.txt.

Level 2

Readable

An agent can comprehend you well enough to answer customer questions on your behalf — services, pricing, hours, policies, the things you can and can't be trusted on. Content and schema work, usually a few weeks.

Level 3

Actionable

An agent can take real actions on your systems — booking, quoting, querying — through a documented API and an MCP server with scoped, observed, reversible tools. The first level where engineering shows up in earnest.

Level 4

Transactable

An agent can complete commercial transactions end-to-end on a customer's behalf — pay, book, ship, receipt — with delegated authorization, signed identity, and audit trails an accountant would accept.

Level 5

Operable

Agents help run the business itself — intake, scheduling, triage, processing — with human oversight and documented handoff rules. Most businesses won't need this. The ones that do, will compound.

Read the long version Score your site for free

[03] — what's new

What's actually new about all this.

The web has had standards for a long time. HTML let browsers read pages. robots.txt told crawlers where to go. Schema.org gave search engines a vocabulary. Each one made a new kind of software useful on the web.

OARS does the same thing for AI agents — open, vendor-neutral, free for anyone to implement. I write and maintain it because the gap was obvious and nobody else was filling it in a coherent way, not because I needed another credential.

Everything on this site flows from that standard. The consulting is implementing it. The training is teaching it. The tools are measuring against it. The data work is mapping how the rest of the web is adopting it.

What OARS covers The full spec at Knov.ai

the open agent readiness standard, by tyler willis

Open standard — read it, implement it, free

Levels 0 through 5 — progressive, measurable

[04] — consulting Three tiers

Three ways to engage on the work.

Same person from first call to last. Each tier is priced clearly, scoped honestly, and grounded in the OARS standard — so you can start small and only go further if the next step makes sense.

Start here

Audit

$2,500 – $5,000 · Fixed scope, fixed price. A five-layer look at where you stand on OARS, with a scored report and a roadmap you could execute yourself. Most people start here.

How the audit works

Build it

Implementation

$10K – $75K · Modular by OARS layer — schema, MCP server, booking and action layer, operational workflows, analytics. Pick the modules that matter; skip the rest.

How implementation works

Keep it healthy

Retainer

$2,500 – $10K / month · An ongoing relationship to maintain, monitor, and evolve your infrastructure as the agent ecosystem moves under it.

How retainers work

[05] — intelligence

A live dataset on the agent web.

The consulting is informed by — and feeds back into — an open intelligence dataset on the AI automation and agent-readiness space. Tools, benchmarks, playbooks, case studies, and the broader market landscape, refreshed continuously and queryable through the web, an API, or an MCP server.

It's part of why a conversation with me starts further down the road than usual. You're not paying me to learn the space on your dime.

Explore the data API & MCP access

live ai automation intelligence dataset maintained by tyler willis

[06] — other work Free + paid

Adjacent work, if you've poked around.

The consulting is the main thing, but it isn't the only thing. A few other places the work shows up — useful on their own, no commitment to anything bigger.

Free

Tools

Scan your domain against OARS, see what AI assistants say about you, audit your schema. No signup. Built primarily so I have honest measurement — left public because there's no good reason not to.

Browse the tools

Subscriptions

Done-for-you products

Managed automation products for freelancers, agencies, and small teams — daily pipeline, fast proposals, reactivation, earned media. They run on my infrastructure and deliver to your inbox.

Browse products

For practitioners

Training & certification

A course, a certification, and a verification program — taught by the person who wrote the standard. For developers, agencies, and consultants who want to do this for their own clients.

About the programs

[07] — free, no signup, no upsell

Track your OARS score over time.

Add your domain once. I'll rescan it monthly and email you when something meaningful changes — a new level unlocked, a regression, a long-missing field that finally got added. Use it on your own site, a client's site, or a competitor you're watching.

Start monitoring — free

Testimonials

Real Results. Real Relationships.

My goal isn't just to build things — it's to build long-term relationships. Most of my work comes from repeat clients and referrals, because they know I show up, communicate clearly, and deliver.

Time and time again, Tyler has proven to be a vital partner for our company. He is accessible, friendly, and willing to work with you to help you get the results you want.

Rebekah Wicke

Marketing Manager, Manufacturing

I know I speak for the entire team when I say that we value Tyler for being diligent and thorough!

Patrick Grabovac

Marketing Manager, Food Processing

We had a great experience working with Tyler and would recommend him in the future!

Tara Peace

Owner, Landscaping

Tyler always takes a high interest in learning about the specific needs of our business, and then recommending digital solutions that fit with our goals.

Donna Sichette

Marketing Manager, Manufacturing

Very pleased with the support we've received from Tyler. He's always been great at communicating technical things in a way that empowers us to learn and grow in our understanding.

Doug Ashley

Owner, Real Estate

The best part about working with Tyler is that he puts a lot of effort into understanding our business and helping us translate it to our website and other marketing materials in a very efficient way.

Humberto Hernandez

Director of Marketing, Food Processing

Tyler provided the expertise and creativity needed for a successful launch of our application.

Jake Olsen

Product Manager, Software

Tyler makes it easy to learn about marketing and websites, and since he explains everything so well it helps us to understand how valuable they can be!

Beth Everett

Executive Director, Nonprofit

Working with Tyler is truly a pleasure. He brings a positive and can-do attitude to each project and helps brainstorm and find solutions that make sense. I appreciate his willingness to help organize a map out a project and he always gets it done on-time and on-budget.

Rhiannon McHugh

Owner, Marketing Agency

Tyler combines deep technical skill with practical, real-world thinking. He explains complex digital ideas clearly and follows through with fast, reliable execution. A true professional.

Phillip Nones

President, Marketing Agency

I've had the pleasure of working with Tyler for over 10 years. He's an excellent strategic thinker and problem solver making him an invaluable member of any team. I would wholeheartedly recommend Tyler for any future opportunity.

Marlayn King

Creative Director, Marketing Agency

Working with Tyler has been a real bright spot and addition to our team. He's honest, hard-working, and someone I never had to chase or second-guess. When problems arise, he remains calm, thinks things through, and comes up with smart, practical solutions. I genuinely trust his judgment and am glad for the opportunity to work with him again and again.

Jenna Goodell

Operations Manager, Marketing Agency

Tyler went above and beyond to help us, even well after our initial project was completed. We will definitely be using him again for future projects.

Amanda Tuttle-Smith

Executive Director, Nonprofit

[09] — not sure where to start?

Let's just talk it through.

If you'd rather not pick a door, send me a note and tell me what's on your mind. I'll respond personally and tell you honestly what I'd do in your shoes — even if it's "do nothing yet" or "you don't need me for this."

Send a note Or book the audit

I respond personally within 1 business day. No pitch — just a real conversation.

[10] — FAQ Common questions

Common questions

Plain-language answers to the things people ask me most often when they're new to all this.

What is OARS, in one sentence?

An open standard that describes what it means for a website to be useable by AI agents — broken into six clear levels, from "an agent can reach your site at all" up to "an agent can run things for you." It's free to read, free to implement, and lives at Knov.ai.

Do I need to be technical to care about any of this?

No. You need to be technical to build some of it, but you don't need to be technical to understand whether your business is ready, or to decide whether it's worth the investment. That's what the audit is for — I translate the technical picture into a business decision.

Is this just SEO with a new name?

It overlaps with SEO — agent-readiness includes some of the same things, like good schema and a healthy sitemap — but the goal is different. SEO is about being found by a person who's searching. Agent-readiness is about being actionable for software that's deciding on someone's behalf. Same web, different consumer.

Where should I actually start?

Run the free OARS scanner against your site. It takes seconds and gives you a real Level 1–2 score. If the score is low, you'll have specific things to fix — which you can do yourself, hand to your developer, or talk to me about. If it's high, you'll know where to focus next.

Do you only work with technical clients?

No. Most of my clients aren't engineers. The job of the consulting is to turn the technical work into business outcomes — booked calls, served customers, retained traffic — so you don't have to learn the stack to benefit from it.

What does it cost to get started?

Nothing for the free tools and the standard itself — those are designed to be useful on their own. The audit starts at $2,500 and is fixed-price; implementation work starts at $10K and is modular; retainers start at $2,500/month. The consulting page walks through each tier.

How do I keep up with this if I'm not ready to do anything yet?

Start the free monthly monitor on your domain. You'll get an email when something changes. No commitment, no upsell — just a quiet way to know where you stand as the web shifts under everyone.